Customer Relationships: Antecedents and Performance Implication

This dissertation, using a two-essay format, focuses on a new avenue for cultivating customer relationships and extends the strategic implications of customer relationships. The first essay uncovers a novel driver of cultivating customer relationships from a product design perspective. Experiential design, the emerging XD design concept, not only motivates purchases but also cultivates customer-brand relationships. It has a potential of extracting the emotional meanings of a design as well as transferring the affection from a product design to the focal brand, exclusive from traditional design dimensions. Importantly, the impact of experiential design is contingent on other design dimensions (e.g., functional and aesthetic), marketing communication ambiguity, and customer subjectivity. The second essay, drawing on customer-company identification theory, valuates a firm's customer base with regard to customer-relationships as well as the reinforcing value creation mechanism. Specifically, customer-relationships asset is defined as a firm's ability to utilize the value creation through customer-customer and customer-firm interactions to achieve organic growth in its market performance. Customer-relationships asset is proposed be a competitive advantage, supported by empirical evidence. Overall, this dissertation provides insights for marketing academics and practitioners on how experiential design dimension cultivates customer-brand relationships and how customer-relationships serve as a firm's strategic asset and competitive advantage through indirect relationship-driven customer interactions.